12 Issue 46 | Quarter Two 2014

FEATURE

love...a modern marketer’s tech guide

All you need is

The arrival of new technologies has opened opportunities for marketing, but taking advantage of them requires a significant shift in modus operandi. In today's 'age of the customer' where consumers have easy access to a multitude of research tools, marketing is all about leveraging technology to gauge customer sentiment and build reputation based on honesty, openness and authenticity. Clare Coulson asked industry thought leaders how businesses should behave and where technology fits....

13Issue 46 | Quarter Two 2014

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love...

14 Issue 46 | Quarter Two 2014

FEATURE // A MODERN MARKETER'S TECH GUIDE

Marketing has come a long way

since Pear’s Soap became the

first legally registered brand in

1789 and French newspaper La

Presse took the first paid advertising in 1836. Indeed

it has come a long way from simple print ads, TV

commercials and billboards. Today Kevin Roberts,

CEO of world-leading advertising agency Saatchi

& Saatchi, talks about ‘lovemarks’ not ‘trademarks’;

brands that touch the heart as well as the mind,

creating an intimate, emotional connection with

their fans.

He says lovemarks inspire ‘loyalty beyond

reason’. “Take a brand away and people will find

a replacement,” the Saatchi & Saatchi website

proclaims, “take a lovemark away and people will

protest its absence. Lovemarks are a relationship,

not a mere transaction.” In short, they are every

marketer’s dream result.

Love and masteryProfessor Simon Bell, professor of marketing &

director of executive education at the University of

Melbourne, refers to Saatchi & Saatchi’s lovemarks

when discussing the new marketing landscape.

He says that today it’s not the product but the

engagement that sells.

“We’ve known for a long time that people value

mastery and we are now seeing that that kind of

need for mastery can extend in to the consumer

space where the customer becomes a better

customer, an educated one through participation

and involvement.

“For a long time I think businesses have thought

that they were the ones solely responsible for

creating what is valuable.”

A recent IBM survey of more than 4000 C-suite

executives, entitled 'The customer activated

enterprise' showed that CEOs have noticed

customers' desire to be engaged as individuals.

They now see customers as a bigger force in

driving company strategy than either company

boards or their own internal strategy function. It’s a

massive shift and according to the study members

of the C-suite agree that there is an entirely new set

of dynamics emerging.

“Customers and citizens expect to be treated

as individuals, which means knowing what

makes each of us ‘tick’: our values, beliefs, habits

and quirks. That, in turn, requires much closer

collaboration between organisations and the people

they serve,” the report says.

With the arrival of online self-service this

VoC solutions collect data on customer needs

from various customer touch points or interaction

channels and use analytical tools to understand

and prioritise them so the business can put the

learnings in to action. Tong says anyone interested

in setting up a VoC programme should have

full commitment from the senior management

in terms of resources, innovation, support and

funding. “Build-in the entire VoC value as part of the

“It’s really important to understand that social networks are both a destabilising and disrupting factor for sales people.”Tom Skotidas, director of Skotidas

collaboration and interaction, which was

traditionally achieved by human contact, must

now also be accomplished via 'intimate systems' –

technologies that create a sense of intimacy.

Good listenersOne way to gauge customer satisfaction is

through a market research technique called 'Voice

of the Customer' or VoC programmes. Alan Tong,

Asia Pacific director of research firm Frost & Sullivan

describes VoC as the perception of customer's

needs and how they drive satisfaction. The strategy

focuses on customer acquisition and retention by

understanding what makes them happy.

organisation’s business strategy in developing the

customer relationship.”

Hot new coupleReferring to the findings of the IBM report,

Ian Wong, interactive experience lead for IBM A/

NZ, says the customer-activated enterprise will

place significant demands on IT systems to build

an ecosystem that is capable of supporting very

complex customer interactions. For CIOs and chief

marketing officers (CMOs) this requires a major

shift in priorities. They need to act in concert

on activities relating to customer experience

management and new business development.

“We see the CIO and the CMO becoming an

15Issue 46 | Quarter Two 2014

increasingly important duo. The CMO and the CIO

need to work in unison for the CEO to really drive

the customer experience that they need to gain

competitive advantage,” says Wong.

Lies and heartbreakAn authentic and fulfilling customer experience is

what sets one brand above another and customers

are finely tuned to detect a fake.

Geoff Ross, creator of 42 Below vodka and it’s

cool-yet-inclusive brand vibe (and ex-Saatchi &

Saatchi man to boot), explains: “All brands need

stories. They need roots, credentials and a reason

for being. The great thing about the internet is

people can look into your backyard really quickly

and if your brand story is not true and genuine you

are going to be found out.” On the up side he says,

the internet has increased the speed of a brand’s

development. “Things can spread really quickly.

Messaging is very scalable on the internet and that

works for you when you have a really compelling

and entertaining story.”

Reputation management specialist Karyn

Arkell, who has kept the gloss on the reputations

of some of Australasia’s biggest brands at Grace

and Acumen agrees. She says the internet has

made everything faster and smartphones have

put cameras and social media in to the hands of

the masses. She advises that people, brands and

businesses think carefully about the company they

keep – the other brands they align or associate

with, the environments they tell their stories in, and

where, when and with whom they are seen. “What

you say is heavily influenced by where and how

you say it,” she says. “Never, ever lie. Always act

with integrity.”

Share the loveBack in 1983 motorbike brand Harley-Davidson

looked like it was on the road to oblivion. Thirty

years later it is a top-50 global brand thanks to

its decision to engage with its core group of fans

and build a community based on the lifestyle,

activities and essence of the brand. This was before

everyone had email and long before web 2.0, social

media and smartphones existed.

But Bell says that marketers today need to relax

and “let the client into the kitchen”. “That’s why

McDonald’s has open kitchens – so that they could

show off the cleanliness of their kitchen and the

good behaviour of the staff. When was the last time

we saw a kitchen in a restaurant behind a greasy

swinging door with a glass portal in it? It’s chefs

front and centre.”

It is a hard thing to do for marketers who

have existed for years on the basis of black box

proprietary technologies and ideas that were

guarded jealously, says Bell, but at the end of the

day the evidence shows that people don’t love

brands for their products but for the communities

they belong to by engaging with the brand. The

clients themselves are part of the conversation

about what a brand represents or means by

interacting not just with the firm through Facebook

and other online discussion portals, but also with

other customers. Those conversations are going on

well and truly outside of marketers’ control.

Sales people are a valuable marketing asset and

Tom Skotidas, director of B2B social media lead

generation company Skotidas, says that social

networks and the internet have changed the way

B2B buyers treat sales professionals. “B2B buyers all

of a sudden have a massive amount of information

that they can rely on to self educate before they call

the sales rep in. And there are studies at prove this:

almost 60 percent of any decision has been made

before a sales rep is called in,” he explains.

“It’s really important to understand that social

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16 Issue 46 | Quarter Two 2014

FEATURE // A MODERN MARKETER'S TECH GUIDE

networks are both a destabilising and disrupting

factor for sales people, but at the same time, if sales

professionals understand this they can actually

arrest the buyer’s attention and be part of their

early decision making and buying process before it

is too late.”

To do this sales people have to forget the sale,

forget the money and become a respected part

of the community their potential buyers frequent.

They must become overwhelmingly focused on

providing insights that solve the needs of their

target audience, without any expectation of a sale.

If they can do that, he says, they will build trust with

the community and an associated perception of

value, and the sales will come naturally.

In fact customer engagement carries such

importance that Bell suggests Android will win

the war over Apple. “Apple are very closed. They

rely on their internal people being the smartest

guys in the room, the ones that will come up with

the solution to all problems. But Apple are still

a minority. We think Apple are dominating but

Android are killing them. In a sense it’s because

Android are an open platform, they are far more

embracing of customer ideas, they publish

roadmaps of where the platforms are going and

Apple don’t and I think it’s to Apple’s detriment in

this regard.”

Pick your battlesRoss, says that discussions in open forums with

customers can be enlightening but it can be easy

to get carried away and influenced by customer

views that, while they maybe irksome or exciting,

are not actually influential. He suggests that looking

at who else is following commenters is a good way

to reference check how influential they are in the

grander scheme of things.

“It’s very easy for people to be a keyboard

warrior; they can hide behind their keyboard and

be pretty vehement and aggressive in their views

but it’s not necessarily what they would tell you

in person and that’s not necessarily what broader

society is thinking either,” he says.

Skotidas says it is easy for companies to over-

estimate the negative impact of social media on

their company and says people are generally quite

forgiving, even in the presence of quite negative

comments. Indeed, marketers should remember

that not everything said about their brand will be

positive but if they listen there may be lessons to

learn about how customers really feel.

Ross warns managers not to let company

strategy become unduly influenced or skewed by

customer’s online comments. “I think that’s really

dangerous because they don’t have the context

or the view or the future understanding or the

intimate knowledge that you do”. At the end of the

day he says you should always act with honesty

and be prepared to know what to listen to and what

to ignore in social media.

Hooking upAs polarising as they are, social media and the

internet have been significant enabling factors in

building brand communities and engaging with

customers authentically, but they are by no means

the only technology-based tactics available to

marketers today.

There are the traditional CRM platforms and

email campaigns, and the more sophisticated

marketing automation platforms, location-based

mobile marketing and loyalty cards integrated

with the point of sale solution. Increasingly there

is targeted digital signage, personalised apps and

digital wallets that attract, convert and smooth the

path to payment. Underpinning the efficacy of all

of these is analytics – real-time analytics, reported

analytics, behavioural analytics etc.

Arkell says she has seen development in this

measurement and reporting area. “We’ve moved

on from things like press clipping services to

integrated brand monitors that give you real-time

monitoring of online conversations.” To get a more

sophisticated and accurate read of a brand’s total

market reputation, however, you need to layer what

your brand research is telling you against what

people are saying on social media, how engaged

they are, how much they are sharing information

etc. “If you layer all of those three things together

you get something that tells you what your total

market impression is like, as opposed to looking at

these things in not only an outdated way but also

in isolation of each other. That’s the area where

progress is being made,” Arkell says.

She admits, however, that it can be a challenge

to get people to invest in these tools despite the

value she believes they offer. Skotidas suggests that

if social media listening software and sentiment

analysis tools are too pricy then free Google alerts,

industry newsletters and an employee or two

that are active on social media provide adequate

substitutes.

Intimately linkedAs Arkell says, there is little point in approaching

each type of marketing and customer-related

activity independently and systems need to be

integrated to offer the best result.

“You need to try to actively integrate it

[online and social media platforms] within your

communications marketing plan. I think that the

best companies and the best relationships with

customers are born out of intimacy. These can be

supported by back office CRM platforms so there

is another technology that needs to be integrated,”

says Bell.

He warns, however, that technology solutions

are not just a bolt-on that automatically result in

loyal customers. ”It’s really the other way around,

you have loyal customers based on what you do,

and the value you create, and CRM platforms are

more a way to make that easier – a facilitating

device,” he says.

Perfect matchThe brands we are loyal to are the brands that

we love. Love comes from intimacy and intimacy

in the marketing world comes from technologies

that facilitate conversations that are personal,

meaningful and authentic. Any technologies that

facilitate intimacy with customers will be the ones

that underpin genuine brand loyalty. Perhaps, at the

end of the day, all we really need is love… and a little

bit of tech.